Brave Tech World

November 7, 2006

TUE 7 NOV 2006

The (Real) Top Ten Lies of Engineers By Marcelo

 

    Guy Kawasaki, a Venture Capitalist with technology roots (Apple), writes the top ten lies of engineers. He is off the mark by a mile!

 

    His list doesn’t come even close with the worst lies of engineers. It looks like he never talked directly to an engineer, only to the engineer’s manager that passed the message to him.

 

    Here is what I think are the worst ten lies:

1. We are on track to ship on the scheduled date.
   (Read: we will be 2-3x late)
   
2. This feature will only take a week to add to the product.
   (read: the feature will take 3 weeks).
   
3. We should rewrite this component because it’s full of bugs.
   (Read: I can’t understand what the previous engineer did, so I think it is easy to write from scratch. It will have the same amount of bugs, but at least I’ll understand)
   
4. I’ve tested the feature and it’s working flawlessly.
   (Read: It’s working flawlessly for my way of doing things. Don’t try to use the drag-and-drop feature ‘cause that’s not how I use it)
   
5. This feature is easy to discovery
   (Read: After you read the documentation on page 37, third paragraph and enabled the checkbox on the options dialog the button will appear on the screen.)
   
6. This feature is easy to use.
   (Read: It’s easy to use as long as you understand relational databases, and/or object hierarchies, and/or state machines, ...)
   
7. Even my mother can use it.
   (Read: My mother has a degree in Computer Science and she develops her own apps, and she will find the feature easy to use.)
   Not a lie, but a misleading statement.
   
8. This feature is Pri 1 (actually, Pri 0). Everybody is going to love it.
   (Read: This feature is so cool to implement.)
   
9. The code is well documented.
   (Read: It’s documented in C++. Why? Don’t you speak C++?)
   
10. We should use inheritance, componentization and some design patterns to simplify the development.
    (Read: This is how we learnt in college and on many UML books. This is the only way to do it, no matter that this is mostly theoretical and very few people successfully accomplished “the perfect code”)

    I could continue on and on with this list. I’ve worked on Microsoft for too many years with many different types of engineers to see all the lies. And don’t take me wrong, most engineers don’t even know they are lying, they truly believe when they say the things that they say.

 

Note: This is a re-post from my old blog.

 

TUE 7 NOV 2006

How do you define 'Active User'? By Marcelo

 

    We been having this debate for a long, long time on Sampa. What is an 'Active User'? Or, is 'Active User' the right way to track activity on the site.

 

    Sampa is different from MySpace, for example. On MySpace an user is somebody that sign up to MySpace and created their page, so, they can say that each MySpace User is an Active User, otherwise they have to cancel their account.

 

    Sampa is not a walled garden, and the sites created by our users are open to the Internet, like on Blogger. We could define 'Active User' by users that change their content on their web site on the last X days. We even prefer 'Active Sites' since you can have multiple editors and administrators of a single site.

 

    Now, let's say that a site has not been updated for 6 months. The easy answer on this case is to consider that site not active anymore, but, what if the site does get a lot of traffic, even with the stale content? We called the people that sign up for Sampa 'Users' and the people that visits their websites 'Visitors'.

 

    Technorati considers an Active Blog any blog that has been updated on the last 3 months. For a pure blog that makes sense, for a Blog like Sampa where you can have photo albums, Flickr/YouTube integration, pages, and other content, you might not post for a long time, but you still have your site.

 

    Right now we have three definitions at Sampa:

• 'Active Sites': Sites that have high traffic in the last X days.
• 'Active Updated Sites': Sites that have been updated in the last W days.
• 'Active Users': Unique Users that visited Sampa Design Site on the last Y days.
• 'Active Visitors': Unique Users that visited any Sampa sites on the last Z days. (this is the typical way websites track their growth).

    The question remains, how much is X, W, Y and Z? 30 days? 60 days? 90 days?

 

    At the end of the day, we should have a single number. We still debating if the 'Sampa Activity' number should be a combo of the values above, or just the number of Unique Users on the public Sampa sites, which is more in-line with today's standard way of tracking usage of a site.